The boy, just out of his teens, tried to blink, but the effort only obscured his vision with blood that flooded from where his eyelids had been cut away. He cried and prayed aloud, reacting to the pain each time he strained to blink.
The Viet Cong woman had pried off each of his fingernails and was now in the process of bending his fingers backward, snapping them at their middle joints. She had finished with the left and right little fingers and was working her way toward the index fingers, one at a time. Breaking a finger every twenty minutes, she followed a well-planned timetable of torture that covered her prisoner’s entire body and would carry the session through the night. At a few minutes before midnight, she had eight fingers to go.
The woman and four men from her platoon sat at the Marine’s feet, speaking softly in Vietnamese and laughing. The remainder of her platoon lay quietly surrounding her in a maze of sniper hides, ready to ambush anyone who might try to come to rescue the prisoner.
The woman chewed betel nut, spitting the juice between her feet as she squatted with her arms resting across the tops of her knees. She looked at the youthful Marine. “You cherry boy? I think maybe no. You get plenty pussy back stateside, yeah. You get Vietnamese pussy too? I think you do. You go China Beach swimming, fuck plenty.
“You like get cherry pussy? Plenty American GI like cherry pussy. Rape many young girl—take cherry pussy. True! I know true.”
She shouted in Vietnamese at the men squatted by her, and they glared at the Marine. The woman walked to where the boy hung limp on the bamboo rack and spit a mouthful of betel nut into his eyes. “You goddamn-fucking GI!” she said.
Hathcock sat on an empty ammunition crate, his arms folded across the top layer of sandbags and his chin resting on them. He stared into the darkness, feeling more and more frustrated as the hours passed. A major sat next to Captain Land, who was still searching the tree line, and talked of sending a company out to find the Marine.
“You’ll end up killing more men and that poor guy, too,” Land told him. “During World War I, the Germans used a tactic of catching a man in the open, shooting him in the legs, and letting him lie there and beg for help. Pretty soon, there would be some hero who couldn’t bear to hear any more, who would organize a rescue. It was always a big mistake.
“We’ve done it here, ourselves. We’ll wound some gooner in a rice paddy and wait for his buddies to drag him away. We’ll sometimes get two or three that way.
“I’ll bet you money they have more mines, booby traps, and snipers between us and that man than you or any other Marine here would care to face in a month.”
“Well, Captain,” the major said, “what do you propose?”
“Sir, just what we’re doing now. We locate them and maybe my snipers can get the bitch. It takes a thief to catch a thief.” The major stood, cleared his throat with a grunt, and walked away. Hathcock sat motionless, his eyes closed, trying to picture in his mind the rocks, trees, trails, and streams that lay beyond die tree line.
“Hathcock,” Wilson said, “hit the rack. You’re not doing any good here. The skipper and I won’t be worth a shit in the morning, and somebody’s got to be functional tomorrow.”
Hathcock spent most of the night awake on his cot, listening to the screams.
As the fog thickened just before dawn, the Viet Cong woman torturer completed her work on her prisoner. “Goddamn-fucking GI. You no fuck no more,” she said, as she approached him with a long, curved knife in her hand. Taking his genitals in her left hand, she jammed the blade’s point beneath the base of his penis, grazing his pubic bone. She pulled the knife with a sweeping, circular cut that released both testicles and his penis in one large handful of flesh that gushed with blood.
Blood surged from the gaping cavity left between his legs. She knew that this man could not last long, and, quickly cutting away the cords that bound him to the bamboo rack, she said, shaking with laughter, “Run, GI. Maybe you live—you find doctor in time! Run to wire. We watch Marines shoot you fucking ass.”
The Marine ran, shouting unintelligibly, as blood gushed so rapidly from his body that it left jellylike pools on the compost of decaying leaves that covered the forest floor. And when he emerged from the trees on the far side of a rice field that lay below the observation post where Land and Wilson watched, he began waving his arms, screaming incoherently and sobbing.
“The poor bastard’s trying to tell us not to shoot,” Land said. “Look at him, Gunny. That bitch has emasculated him.”
Several Marines ran toward the wire, only to see him fall headlong into the curled strands of concertina wire, dead.
The final nightmarish cries had awakened Hathcock, and he had just reached the observation point when the Marine ran the final yards of his life. The sniper hung his head and shook, his anger rising to a nearly uncontrollable peak.
“I want her!” Hathcock said in a strained voice, his teeth and fists clinched.
Land didn’t speak, but wrapped his arm around Hathcock’s shoulders. He, too, felt the need for revenge.
9. Sign of the Sniper
“SERGEANT HATHCOCK,” A voice whispered in the darkness, “the time on deck is zero three hundred.” Hathcock opened his eyes to see a black figure at the foot of his cot. The Marine standing the duty watch, who now was making his wake-up rounds, pushed the button on his flashlight and pointed the beam at him. “You awake?”
“Turn that off,” Hathcock ordered, holding one hand in front of his face to block the light. “I’m awake.”
The Marine woke two other men, then he walked out of the hooch and let the screen door slam.
Hathcock gave instructions to the two Marines, then laced his boots and headed toward the mess tent. He would spend the day leading a student sniper team in the farmlands and forests west of Hill 55. He felt that area offered the best hunting and an ideal classroom for teaching his new snipers the craft of operating from a hide.
As he sat sipping coffee and reading notes scrawled in his sniper log, the two sergeants joined him. The three Marines huddled in the dim glow of a small lantern set on their table, sipping coffee and discussing the best combinations of men to team for this day’s missions.
Two hours later, Hathcock and his sniper students were hidden at the edge of a forest that climbed the hills up to Charlie Ridge. Their hide overlooked a patchwork of rice paddies and trails, bordered by a community of thatched huts.
To their right, Hathcock could see Hill 55’s dark blue peak jutting through a thin, white vet) of fog.
The edge of the sun boiled above Hill 55. A flock of white sea birds silently flew across the sunrise, and Hathcock wondered at the contrast between the morning’s beauty and the war’s ugliness.
He knew that in this land few people noticed the beauty of a sunrise. Mornings were a time for making war. Hathcock gazed across the wide patchwork of fields and scattered huts, his thoughts of peace and beauty dissipating from his consciousness. He thought of the woman who butchered the young Marine a fortnight ago and wondered where she was hiding now. He was certain that this new day represented nothing for her except a time for war. And with that thought, it became that for him as well.
He watched three silhouette figures walking along the dikes that divided the rice fields and lotus ponds and, as they emerged into a streak of sunlight that stretched down the length of the valley between Hill 55 and Charlie Ridge, he put his eye to the M-49 spotting scope on the tripod in front of him. Examining them closely through the twenty-power telescope, he saw that the men carried hoes, not rifles. They were farmers on their way to the fields.
In the corner of his eye, Hathcock caught the student who took the first watch behind the sniper rifle—a burly private first class—tightening his grip around the small of the gun’s stock, preparing to shoot one of the men. Saying nothing, Hathcock placed his hand over the rear optic of the rifle’s scope. The PFC turned and smiled guiltily.
Hathcock motioned for the other student to take the sniper rifle. The first Marine would spend the remainder of the day with his instructor, but once they returned to the hill, he would be gone.
The three Marines continued their vigil, quietly hidden among the soft, green ferns and grass, beneath a low
